Terry Eagleton Quotes

To be a good editor or a good writer, I think you really need to be a great reader first.

Whereas the work is understood to be traceable to a source (through a process of derivation or "filiation"), the Text is without a source - the "author" a mere "guest" at the reading of the Text.

the process of reading is reciprocal; the book is no more than a formula, to be furnished out with images out of the reader's mind.

Our amended Constitution is the lodestar for our aspirations. Like every text worth reading, it is not crystalline. The phrasing is broad and the limitations of its provisions are not clearly marked. Its majestic generalities and ennobling pronouncements are both luminous and obscure. This ambiguity of course calls forth interpretation, the interaction of reader and text. The encounter with the Constitutional text has been, in many senses, my life's work.

In reading we must become creators.

Reading is perception as translation. The inert signs of an alphabet become living meanings in the mind.

We are now in want of an art to teach how books are to be read rather than to read them. Such an art is practicable.

It is my contention that the process of reading is part of the process of writing, the necessary completion without which writing can hardly be said to exist.

As for the discipline, we [me and Frank Moore Cross] belong to two different disciplines. One involves research and archaeological materials. Mine is more interpretive. But it is the love for the text that is there, and that is what makes the whole adventure of reading and studying and sharing worthwhile.

We must be forewarned that only rarely does a text easily lend itself to the reader's curiosity... the reading of a text is a transaction between the reader and the text, which mediates the encounter between the reader and writer. It is a composition between the reader and the writer in which the reader "rewrites" the text making a determined effort not to betray the author's spirit.

You aren't an object. You're a process of some sort.

Every text assumes a reader.

The power of a text when it is read is different from the power it has when it is copied out. Only the copied text thus commands the soul of him who is occupied with it, whereas the mere reader never discovers the new aspects of his inner self that are opened by the text, that road cut through the interior jungle forever closing behind it: because the reader follows the movement of his mind in the free flight of day-dreaming, whereas the copier submits it to command.

I read passionately with a need to know and see the act of reading as an act of cognition and not simply a means of passing time.

We read privately, mentally listening to the author's voice and translating the writer's thoughts. The book remains static and fixed; the reader journeys through it.

Thinking is different from perceiving and is held to be in part imagination, in part judgment

Dialogue is really aimed at going into the whole thought process and changing the way the thought process occurs collectively. We haven't really paid much attention to thought as a process. We have engaged in thoughts, put we have only paid attention to the content, not to the process. Why does thought require attention? Everything requires attention, really. If we ran machines without paying attention to them, they would break down. Our thought, too, is a process, and it requires attention, otherwise its going to go wrong.

We like books that have a lot of dreck in them, matter which presents itself as not wholly relevant (or indeed, at all relevant) but which, carefully attended to, can supply a kind of "sense" of what is going on. This "sense" is not to be obtained by reading between the lines (for there is nothing there, in those white spaces) but by reading the lines themselves looking at them and so arriving at a feeling not of satisfaction exactly, that is too much to expect, but of having read them, of having "completed" them.

The thought process can never be complete without articulation.

You can't think of nothing.

It consists mainly of the storm of thoughts that is forever blowing through one's head.

The act of reading is a partnership. The author builds a house, but the reader makes it a home.

I love watching him think," Maeve told Lily. "You can almost hear that poor little hamster running and running on its wheel.

Thinking is the desire to gain reality by means of ideas.

Thinking nurseth thinking.